How To Reinvent Yourself Into A New Career

Dorie Clark
, ContributorI write about marketing, branding and business strategy.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

How do you make a career change when you have no experience in the field you want to enter? It’s a topic I write about extensively in my book Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future. That’s why I was so impressed by the story of Cali Williams Yost, an author and consultant who pulled off a major professional reinvention two decades ago when, as a bank manager, she became passionate about work-life fit issues. “We were losing people because of work-life issues,” she recalls. “I said, ‘Why don’t we let these people work from home one day a week, or work three or four days a week so we can keep them? Their relationships are so important that if we lose that person, it’s going to hurt our business.’”

Her suggestions were ignored, and she started compiling a “six-inch folder in my desk with any information I could find” about work-life issues. She decided she wanted to become a work-life strategist, but it was a nascent field with few opportunities in the early 1990s. Her process for reinventing herself – she’s now a recognized expert and author of the new book Tweak It: Make What Matters to You Happen Every Day – has lessons for any professional who wants to move into a new career without much previous experience. Here’s how she did it.

Get the Credentials. “At the time, most of the people leading the flexibility and work-life field were PhDs in child development,” Yost recalls. “The only way senior leaders were going to listen to me is if I had [equally impressive] credentials.” She realized an Ivy League MBA would help her communicate more effectively with the C-suite; she applied and earned one from Columbia.

Hone Your Narrative. When she interviewed for an internship with the Families and Work Institute, Yost was painfully aware of what she lacked. “I brought no value to them; I knew that,” she says. “I had to learn everything from scratch, including quantitative and qualitative research.” But she had honed her pitch: as a former banker and an MBA student, she had one unique strength she could emphasize. “I said, ‘Here’s what I know: I know how talk about and analyze businesses, and I will bring that skill set to what you’re doing.’ The woman who was co-president said, ‘You’re lucky; we just got an engagement with Chase Bank, and you can help me on that.’”

Make Connections. After graduation from her MBA program, “Other people were getting jobs at $100,000 a year from McKinsey, and I was hired by the Families and Work Institute to plan their annual conference.” The money was nowhere near McKinsey levels, but there was one important benefit: “The woman who hired me said, ‘Look, be smooth, but you can use this as your networking opportunity.’ I spent four months talking to everybody in the field, and I figured out how to build my skill set so that I was valuable doing this work. That’s where it all began.”

Changing careers and reinventing yourself isn’t easy – particularly when you’re passionate about a new field with no clearly-defined point of entry. But as Yost’s experience shows, being clear about your goals and steadily moving forward on your plan can get you there.